I doubt strongly that there is an economic race between India and China. If it is perceived that one exists, we may thank the Western media circus for that, since the media often compares the annual growth of India’s GDP with China’s.
The answer to Parfitt’s question leads to another question that should have been asked instead.
Will India’s corruption [50% of GDP], poverty [25%], literacy rate [61%] and debt problems hinder it in its supposed economic race with China? Source of facts used: CIA Factbook
By comparison, literacy in China is 92.2% and those living below the poverty line according to the CIA Factbook represent 2.8% of the population.
India’s GDP [Purchasing Power Parity – PPP], according to the CIA Factbook, was about $4 trillion dollars in 2010 but its public debt was 50.6% of GDP. It’s reserves of foreign exchange and gold was $287.1 billion [this is the same as a savings account], and its external debt was $316.9 billion, which shows us that India owes more money than it has in its savings account. In addition, it has been reported that corruption in India is worse than China.
By comparison, China’s GDP [PPP] in 2010 was more than $10 trillion and its public debt was 16.3% of GDP, its savings account held almost $3 trillion and its external debt was $519 billion.
Another point of comparison is the US GDP [PPP], which was $14.66 trillion with $14.71 trillion in external debt and a public debt of 62.9%, while its savings account holds $132.4 billion.
With these numbers, which country is in the best shape economically to face challenges at home and globally in the near future and in the long run?
I replied to Mr. Parfitt’s comments and there was another reply from Alessandro, a regular visitor to this Blog. The reason I’m writing this post is the IGNORANCE Factor, which plays far too large a role in the circus of American politics and public opinion, which is often inflamed by the biased opinions of individuals such as Mr. Parfitt.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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In our debate, one of Parfitt’s tactics was to often throw out short claims/opinions as if they were bullets from a machine gun while cherry picking the facts [also known as confirmation bias, my-side bias and verification bias] used to support his opinions, which he treated as facts.
If you doubt my claim, read the entire debate and see if even once Parfitt admitted his beliefs were nothing but his personal opinions subject to bias. And mark my words, all opinions are subject to bias unless supported by a vast majority of facts that are not cherry picked.
Cherry picking is the act of pointing at individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position, while ignoring a significant portion of related cases or data that may contradict that position.
Confirmation bias is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses regardless of whether the information is true. These biases appear in particular for emotionally significant issues and for established beliefs.
For this sort of bias to succeed in winning over others, it often depends on the ignorance of the people.
Mr. Parfitt said in his comment, “So, if China is a republic, and Sun Yat-sen wanted a republic based on the American model, has SYS’s dream been realized in China? One of the tenets of Sun’s philosophy was democracy. Has China achieved democracy?”
My answer to this question is easy but the longer explanation to counter Parfitt’s misleading confirmation bias will appear later in this series of posts.
The short answer is YES, what Sun Yat-sen may have envisioned as a republic for China may have been achieved more by today’s Chinese Communist Party [CCP] than Taiwan.
In fact, we will never really know exactly what Sun Yat-sen wanted as a Republic in China, since he died in 1925 before he achieved his dream of unifying China.
However, we can gain a better idea of what his vision may have been by discovering what it was like in Hawaii and America at the time Sun Yat-sen lived in Hawaii before it was a territory of the US.
Readers may find it interesting that Hawaii was a Republic [1894 -1898] before it became a territory of the United States [1898 – 1959], and before it became a state in 1959.
In fact, a commission during the administration of President Grover Cleveland [1885–1889 and 1893–1897] concluded that the removal of Queen Lili’uokalani was illegal, and the U.S. government demanded that she be re-instated.
Then in 1993, a joint Apology Resolution regarding the overthrow of Hawaii’s Queen was passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton, apologizing for the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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This post was originally a result of a comment on the China Law Blog, which chastised me because, “He wanted me to provide a super-quick summary of The Economist cover story comparing India with China, but it (I) did not,” which was correct then.
At one point, Mr. Parfitt mentioned reviews of his book in Publisher’s Weekly in defense of his book not being racisit. He claimed the South China Morning Post didn’t say that. Neither did Publishers Weekly, the Korean Herald, The Vancouver Sun… and none of the Amazon reviewers [that may change].
However, Publisher’s Weekly [PW] did say this of his book, “The result is mostly traveloguetold from an outsider’s perspective, contextualized with overviews of major events in Chinese history. Parfitt argues that China will not rule the world, because as a nation it is more interested in the appearance of success than actual substance. He suggests that culturally, China has little to offer…” In addition, PW says, “his book lacks the precise facts and figures that he decries in other books promoting Chinese dominance.”
The facts and figures missing from Mr. Parfitt’s “Why China Will Never Rule the World – Travels in the Two Chinas” are important as the China Law Blog says. To judge one country without comparing its government, economy and culture to other countries offers no balance for readers to make informed decisions.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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For the next few days, we will focus on India and China as a topic. The first post is about the 1962 border war between the two countries.
America is not the first country to attempt nation building (Iraq and Afghanistan). The British Empire did it much earlier and left behind a mess in India, the Middle East and Africa. Too bad the US didn’t learn from that failure.
In the 19th century, with the reckless stoke of a pen or pencil, British Explorer McMahon drew the borders on maps creating India.
Due to this British arrogance, India has had border disputes/wars with China, Nepal and Pakistan. Source: Boundaries
In fact, before the British Empire established the Raj, India wasn’t a country, and no Chinese government was included in the changes McMahon made to the borders between Tibet and India. Source: Victorian Web
At the time, the Qing Dynasty like the Yuan and Ming Dynasties before it considered Tibet part of China.
In 1947, soon after the end of World War II, India gained its independence from Britain, and the Indian government refused to negotiate with China over land that was once was part of China-Tibet.
After 1949, Mao’s government told India that some of the land behind the McMahon line in India was part of China-Tibet and the PRC wanted that land back.
For thirteen years, China and India held a series of diplomatic conversations about this boundary issue. Zhou Enlai, the first prime minister of the PRC, attempted to convince Jawaharlal Nehru to resolve the boundary issue peacefully.
With the failure of peaceful negotiations, Chinese troops were sent to the McMahon Line. In the embedded video are actual battle scenes from the China-Indian conflict of 1962.
India’s Nehru government repeatedly rejected China’s requests to negotiate the border dispute over the McMahon Line.
Instead, the Indian army built bases and outposts in the disputed area. Then Chinese troops strengthened their defenses on their side of the disputed border.
India sent patrols into territory occupied by China and its troops were captured. Then on June 4, 1962, Indian troops built fortified outposts deep in the disputed territory.
On September 8, 1962, Chinese troops surrounded the Indian outposts to stop further advances.
In the middle of September, Chinese intelligence reported that the Indian army would soon attack due to India’s Seventh Brigade being deployed to launch Operation Leghorn.
The first move by India took place on October 9, when Indian troops crossed the river that divided the two armies and attacked Chinese positions.
The resulting battle caused the Indian Seventh Brigade to collapse and a large number of Indian troops surrendered and were taken prisoner by the Chinese.
Chinese troops then counter attacked and crossed the river pushing south as the Indian troops retreated faster than the PLA could advance.
In addition, heavy Chinese artillery bombed Indian troop positions while China moved their Eleventh and Fifty-fifth divisions to the front.
To stop the Chinese advance, the Indian army had four brigades set up defensive positions along the only mountain road leading south through the harsh terrain.
At the same time, India planned to launch an assault on the Chinese army.
In a risky flanking maneuver, the Chinese sent 1,500 troops along a dangerous mountain trail to attack India’s Army in the rear and cut them in half.
The Chinese troops succeeded, and the Chinese army followed up with an attack from the north along the road.
India’s Sixty-second Brigade collapsed the first day. Soon after, India’s Sixty-fifth Brigade abandoned their positions without a fight.
News of the Indian army’s defeat reached New Delhi, and the people panicked causing large numbers of refugees to flee south.
When Chinese troops advanced into India beyond the disputed territory, China declared a unilateral cease fire.
There were abandoned Indian weapons everywhere and the Chinese troops gathered the weapons, which were returned to India. Then the Indian troops that were prisoners of war were released.
China then withdrew its troops to the claimed border keeping the disputed territory. Similar to the Korean Conflict, the war ended without a treaty.
India’s Casualties
Killed = 4,885
POW = 3,968
Wounded = 1,697
China’s casualties Killed 722
Wounded 1,696
Since the 1962 war, China and India have continued to argue about the disputed area, which includes a portion of Kashmir and the eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.
Another area in dispute is Ladakh. For centuries, Ladakh was an independent kingdom but is now part of India with obvious cultural links with China.
In Ladakh, no one knows where India ends and China begins. China and India still share the biggest stretch of disputed border in the world divided by Nepal and Bhutan from Arunachal Pradesh in the south to Kashmir in the north.
Al Jazerra English – Renewed Tension Over India-China Border
India says the border violations were probably a mistake, but China says they never happened.
Diplomatic letters that Al Jazeera acquired show that both India and China are not telling the truth about Ladakh. Indian nomads wondered into Chinese occupied territory and were warned to leave or face the consequences.
The diplomatic letters also show that China does not accept that the area is disputed. Instead, China says it is their territory.
The Indian army keeps a heavy military presence on India’s side of the border in Ladakh and the Al Jazeera reporters were not allowed to visit the Chinese side.
What did you learn about China from its actions during this conflict, and/or you may also want to discover The Sino-Vietnam War of 1979
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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There appears to be an obsession in the West that India, since it is a democracy, is the developing country to counterbalance China’s economic and military growth.
The American Interest published a piece in their May/June 2010 issue – The Return of the Raj, which points out that where G. W. Bush failed to build an Indo-U.S. defense pact, Secretary of State Clinton in a visit to India in July 2009 did open the door to significant arms transfers from the U.S. to India.
If the United States and India can together rediscover and revive the Indian military’s expeditionary tradition, they will have a solid basis for strategic cooperation not only between themselves but also with the rest of the world’s democracies. Source: The American Interest
In another piece, A Himalayan rivalry, The Economist focuses on the 1962 conflict between India and China saying, “Memoires of a war between India and China are still vivid in the Tawang valley…”
However, memoires aren’t everything. There is also knowledge, and China is not the same country it was in 1962.
In 1962, some of the factors that led to the war between India and China were linked to Mao’s policies, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
The Maoists were removed from power in the 1980s, and China is not the same socialist nation it was then.
Unlike India, China’s one party political system allows for quick decisions that often benefit the country.
Another important factor to remember is that China is still a collectivist nation as India is.
Due to this fact, China and India have more in common than India and America.
It does not matter that India is considered the world’s largest democracy, because to counter that, India also has a large bureaucracy that makes it difficult to get things done.
However, in India, the bureaucracy has a reputation for being tremendously arrogant and corrupt. It is a truism that Indian bureaucrats are generally smug and supercilious… source: Open India
Indian bureaucracy has often been criticized for being cumbersome and stretching procedures to sanction projects. Source: Meri News
A friend, Tom Carter, while shooting his next book in India, discovered that it was easier to travel and stay in China than India.
A study of individualist and collectivist orientations across occupational groups in India by Anjali Ghosh where he refers to a study by Sinha & Verma (1994) … that masters-level university students express more idiocentric (individualist) orientations than allocentric (collectivist) due to Western influence, immediate life concerns and exposure to mass media.
However, Verma & Triandis (1999) observed that Indian students were more vertical collectivist than U.S. students were.
Another fact is that China and India both have ancient civilizations more than 5,000 years old and they are next-door neighbors as Canada and the US are.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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